When you, despite talk therapy/coaching, have not come to terms with your fear, worry and anxiety, it is often because traditional talk therapy/coaching focuses on the brain and is based on the idea that the mindset causes feelings, problems and unwanted behaviors. But many times, it's not just your thought patterns that are the cause of your fears, worries and anxieties. There are parts of our brain, such as the amygdala, that are not so accessible to language and where conscious thinking and conversation don’t help. We need to work bottom-up with feelings and sensations in the body.
What is anxiety?
If you think of anxiety as a physiological function, rather than psychological. That anxiety is an alarm in the body, often due to unresolved emotional energy that is trapped in the body and in the nervous system, and which is then the generator of negative thoughts. The brain is a meaning-making unit that tries to figure out what the unpleasant feeling in the body means and thus gain control over the emotion and find a solution to what to do about it. So, let's say you're having a stressful day. Your brain starts to think "what's the reason for the stress/worry/anxiety?" The brain begins to look for threats to understand and, by extension, create control and find a solution to the problem. You start thinking that the stress could be about your job, your relationship, your bills..." But what if there's something stored in your body from way back in time that you don't even remember anymore? Please read here about how I work and what bottom-up processing means.
You can't think your way out of
an emotional problem.
The fear of confronting unhealed emotions and sensations in the body makes us stay in our heads ruminating, thinking and worrying. We believe that being trapped in our heads is a better option than experiencing difficult feelings and sensations. We believe that thought, logic and cognitive understanding will solve the problem. But it usually doesn't work. We need to address both emotions and bodily sensations, not just the thoughts.
With the help of hypnosis, hypnotherapy, EMDR, trauma-informed coaching, energy work and practical coaching we can find the background alarm in your system and break the connection between the thoughts and the alarm, to ultimately break the anxiety loop. We can work online with the same good results as IRL with me in Malmö, Sweden.
Find out how the practical and a session works.
Being in your head
Staying in the head is a way to distract us from the negative emotions and sensations in the body. We turn up the worry volume in our head as much as needed so that we don’t move into the body, because in the body are the feelings and we are often afraid of them. The fear of emotions is often due to the fact that when we experienced the emotions for the very first time, often when we were younger, we had fewer resources to deal with these emotional storms and we still think that we cannot handle them, even if we are adults.
Your brain will always try to understand what's going on to help you address the problem, but that's when you get stuck in the loop. Your anxiety in your body is triggered by people or situations where your emotions are not healed. Your brain becomes anxious and runs a gauntlet between thoughts about what is dangerous, what could happen, what to do, how to handle things, and how to regain control. The thoughts intensify the anxiety in the body and the anxiety in the body in turn generates more anxious thoughts. Now you have an alarm loop.
Foreground alarm and background alarm
A foreground alarm is something threatening that happens to you here and now and where you need to protect yourself, such as a speeding car or a violent person. A background alarm comes from negative events that have happened to you earlier in life and that are still unresolved. These negative events and emotions are sometimes triggered and spring the alarm with strong fear, worry and anxiety. A signal is sent to the brain stem that there is a threat and that we are not safe.
If you experience anxiety for no apparent reason, then it’s probably a background alarm that has been activated. You may not even know the original source of the anxiety. It doesn't have to be work, relationships, or crowds. This is where the problem is triggered, but often we find the origin of the anxiety further back in time. This is what we need to heal.